David Ward - Landscape Photography - Into The Light

Light-buckets Part 2

There’s a mental checklist that many of us go through when making an image, starting with the essentials… Battery ok? Room on the card? Check the edge of the frame? Highlights controlled? Exposed to the right? And finishing with matters of only peripheral importance… Socks? Jacket? Trousers?! The third item on the first list bears some scrutiny…

Checking the edge of the frame, making sure that it’s neat and tidy without anything unwanted intruding into the frame, is seen as an important part of the process of making a photograph – though usually thought of as little more than a housekeeping exercise. But I think that this process actually points to a significant difference between how photographers and other visual artists work.

Photographers have few ways to make our mark, to stamp our authorship, on the image compared to other art forms. One immediate way is to show that we’ve taken care with our selection. And what we exclude is as important as what we include when we want to prove attention to detail. So, whereas a painter might go to considerable trouble to include part of an object on the edge of the frame, a photographer would more likely either include it in its entirety or exclude it completely.

Think for a moment of a figurative painter applying pigment to delineate a portion of a tree on the edge of their canvas. It might only be peripheral to the composition but nevertheless a good deal of effort – both mental and physical - was involved in including it. In other words, its partial inclusion wasn’t accidental. What might the motives for expending all this effort be?

It occurs to me that, by painting these partial inclusions, the realist painter is trying to suggest a world beyond the frame of their composition. The part-tree might be seen as a sign of veracity. If the painted world fits too neatly within the frame it will appear too obviously constructed. For some genres this isn’t a problem but for anything with pretensions to realism it might be. Photographers don’t have the same problem; the veracity of photographs is largely taken for granted. So, rather than it seeming too pat, when extraneous elements don’t break the frame it’s seen as a sign of the photographer’s skill and judgement.

Cartier Bresson, as I mentioned in part one of this blog post, is credited with introducing the notion of the ‘decisive moment’ to photography. The emphasis, in his description of a significant moment worth immortalizing as an image, is definitely on time. But of course moments are made up of more than just time. For a moment to be photographically significant it must have content worth looking at; the space described must be interesting in some way. And more than this it needs to be viewed from an appealing perspective. The selection of the decisive moment is therefore equally bound up in the selection of a ‘good’ point of view.

The point of view is defined by the photograph’s frame. You might say that in many ways the choice of framing is the most important element in a photograph. The content is obviously key but the photograph’s frame, the boundary of the image’s description, plays a vital part in giving it meaning. As John Szarkowski wrote in The Photographer’s Eye,

To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject? The line of decision between in and out is the picture’s edge.

I had a real "Eureka!" moment whilst reading this passage for the first time a few years ago. Of course, I thought, this is what photography is all about! How could I not have seen this earlier?!?

The frame cuts off the photograph’s subject from its context, and, in the process, also collapses all possible views into the one that is re-presented to the viewer. In this way the frame concentrates our attention; it marks what is within as worthy of consideration – or at least that the photographer felt it worthy.

Painters often start in the middle of a literal and metaphorical blank canvas. But we tend to start by finding the edges of the frame, in order best to portray a section of the ultimate complexity of our world. Photography is a process of distillation. By placing a frame around a portion of reality we say "Look at this bit more carefully!" Framing grants importance, it cajoles the viewer into considering not only the objects within the frame but also their relationship to each other. By containing the subject(s), a frame can make clear patterns and juxtapositions that would otherwise seem inconsequential or even irrelevant. As Szarkowski put it, “[The frame] is to the photograph as the cushion is to the billiard table.”

Light-bucket cameras, like the Nikon V1, have ‘best photo’ modes which sort through a set of images made in a burst and present the one that they deem the best based on algorithms that analyse facial expression and composition. Now, I’ve not had a chance to play with this yet so I don’t know how consistently this works but it’s clear that the automation can only work with selections chosen by the photographer. The photographer still needs to point the camera towards something they consider interesting and try and frame it in the best way they know how. So, this very clever computing will never make a good photographer out of a bad one. All it can ever hope to do - assuming that the algorithms work well - is present the ‘least bad’ image from a set.

The frame also defines the individual photographer’s gaze; it says, "look at what I saw". For great photographers the way a subject is framed becomes as distinctive as the way Dickens wrote prose or Beethoven composed a symphony, the frame placing quotation marks around a portion of the real world. This is no mean trick. The acclaimed American photorealist painted Chuck Close has pointed out that, “[Photography] is the hardest medium in which to express some kind of personal vision because there is no touch, there is no hand, there is no physicality.” Other arts often quite literally leave an imprint of the craftsman: brushstrokes or chisel marks. With writing or music the artist’s vision, and by extension facets of their personality, is revealed through their style. To impose one’s style is no simple task given the constraints of composition (i.e. a sentence has to make sense!) and that there are only so many words - or so many notes - to play with. But it’s even harder in photography where there can be no maker’s marks since the frame, apparently, “simply” encloses a view constrained by reality. Sure, one might use outlandish filtration or extreme viewpoints or photograph weird subject matter in order to stamp one’s identity on an image. But the very best photographers leave their mark without resorting to such cheap, obvious tricks.

Chuck Close again: “The fact that you can have something that's recognisable from fifty feet across the gallery as a Diane Arbus or Irving Penn, the fact that you can have recognisable authorship means that they really have done something because it's a damn hard thing to do.” Given that “all” a photograph does is frame a slice of reality and re-present it how can the photographer imprint their personal vision? The answer is that they can’t in a single image. Recognition of a particular photographic vision depends upon us knowing a body of work, only then might we recognize a single Arbus or Penn. It therefore seems a huge irony that so much is made of the “rules” of composition, supposedly a set of standards to be adhered to. Great photographers don’t play by the rules; rather they frame their viewpoint to reflect their point of view.

Light-buckets Part 1

The wonderful world of digital cameras continues to move on at a dizzying pace. Though the pixel wars of yore now seem but a dim and distant memory – thank goodness – the manufacturers continue to try and knock lumps off each other by coming up with new and better ideas for how the humble camera should work. In July last year, Canon announced the Wonder Camera at the World Expo in Shanghai. The specification was impressive with massive (though unspecified) storage, ultra-high (also unspecified) resolution, a single lens with a zoom ratio from ultra wide to 500mm and the ability to keep everything viewable in focus at the same time. But this isn’t a stills camera in the traditional sense. Rather than make individual images, Wonder Camera owners would simply choose frames grabbed from a video recording. No more tedious waiting for the right moment to press the shutter, just set the camera running round about when something interesting is happening and find the best image afterwards whilst sitting with your feet up in the comfort of your favourite armchair. In fact, no more bothering to frame up a composition as the images would be of such high quality that one could just crop a small portion of any view and get something useable.

Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s all a logical consequence of ever-increasing resolution, storage and processing power. After all any self respecting compact these days has far more computing power than the Lunar Module. But holding your breath in anticipation at this point would be distinctly unhealthy… Canon estimate that it will be two decades before we can nip down to the camera store and pick one up, if anything as archaic as a physical shop still exists in so distant a future.

Not to be outdone, Nikon have just released the V1 and seem to have drastically shortened the 20 year waiting period for one of the features of the Wonder Camera. This compact camera with interchangeable lenses has a number of revolutionary new features - at least new to stills cameras. The line between stills and movie cameras has effectively disappeared over the last few years, with even quite modest compacts being capable of HD video. One feature that has been borrowed by the V1 from high-end video cameras is the image buffer. In smart photo mode, the V1 is constantly recording what’s in front of it so that when you press the shutter it not only captures your decisive moment but also writes the images made in the 5 seconds before you even thought of pressing the release. Speaking to wildlife cameramen at the recent Nature in Focus event I discovered that HD movie cameras have had this feature for a number of years – as Charlie Hamilton James remarked, “It allows you still to play Solitaire on your phone and not worry about pressing the record button until the kingfishers mating is almost over…” Now that is handy! The V1 even goes one step further; it sorts through the 20 full frame images it has captured and finds the ‘best’ based upon focus, facial expressions and composition. Quite how anyone has managed to design an algorithm that can assess composition is beyond me (...something that I’ll return to in part 2).

As if that weren’t enough 'future shock' for one year, a company called Lytro has just announced a product that is being trumpeted as the most significant change in the way photographs are captured since the late 1800’s. Such a statement, if justified, will make all the upheavals of swapping from film to digital seem like just a storm in a teacup. So what’s so radical about the Lytro? Basically, you can choose afterwards where you would like the image to be sharp. Is the image not quite pin-sharp on your subject’s eyes? No worries, just click on the image in the Lytro image browser and change the point of focus at will. And this isn’t due to some whizzo new autofocus system. The change is far more fundamental than that.

Conventional photography captures values for colour and luminosity of light rays falling on the sensor or film plane but doesn’t pay any attention to the angle of individual rays of light. The Lytro works by collecting this additional vector information for every ray of light falling on the sensor – you can read more about how this works on their website. The extra information captured is said to define the light field for a particular scene. Capturing the vector details allows the images to be re-focused by calculation alone. The computational part of the process works a little like a ray tracing graphics package in reverse, calculating how far each ray of light has travelled. It used to require a supercomputer or two but Lytro have managed to reduce all that to a chip in the camera.

Incidentally, I’ve not had confirmation of this but it would seem to be a relatively simple matter for the whole scene to be rendered in sharp focus from immediately in front of the camera to infinity. And this even though the camera has a fixed aperture of f2. It’s like focus stacking on steroids! Goodbye Scheimpflug? Just possibly, though at the moment the resolution of the consumer camera is quite low. It would certainly have sorted out my problems with the image that accompanies this blog…

At a recent Q&A session I was asked if I thought that digital technology had improved photography. I said no, but it was pointed out to me that in the wildlife arena focus tracking and other improvements in the digital era had made new kinds of images possible or at least easier to achieve. So, the obvious question is what difference will these technologies bring to the way we make photographs? I don’t mean by this the physics of capture – what the technology in these cameras might enable us to capture is a separate question. I’m more interested in whether these technologies might be, as their manufactures suggest, a panacea for bad photography.

There’s a widely held belief that the pre-eminent skill of a great photographer is the ability to recognise and capture a significant moment. I guess we could blame the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson for championing this viewpoint, though blame is perhaps a little harsh. He published “The Decisive Moment”, a book of his reportage images, in 1954. Although he didn’t coin the phrase, instead borrowing it from a text by an obscure C17th French cardinal, his images seem to fit very well with the ideal that every great photograph is dependent upon capturing a significant portion of the river of time.

"Photography is not like painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

The Wonder Camera (I’m starting to find that name distinctly annoying!) and the Nikon V1 seek to get round this awkward need to react quickly by saving all of the river of time at a particular point – in fact you could think of them as very big buckets for holding light. (One thing that occurs to me is where do we put all this information that we’ve collected? Most digital photographers I know now are already holding terabytes of images. The data storage problem can only get more complicated with the likes of the V1. Key wording and other aspects of database management will become increasingly vital if we’re not to lose that great image we made amidst the also-rans.) The Lytro seeks to get past the awkward problem of not having chosen the right point of focus when you pressed the button. Both of these technological advances should make it easier to make the vast majority of images useable. But will they improve the artistic or aesthetic content of photographs to the same degree? And will they facilitate an improvement in how many images achieve some kind of insight?

Of course making a great photograph is not just about the “moment” (or even sometimes about the “moment” at all); it’s also about where you are in relation to the “moment”. Some things only achieve significance from a particular viewpoint – think of the image of Jack Ruby shooting John F Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The picture that graced a million newspaper pages was taken in a crowded loading bay. Only two of the many photographers present got a clear view of the action and only one of those captured the “moment”. Though I doubt that he intended it to apply to a news image this example seems to confirm Ansel Adams’ view that “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”

Great photographs are about making selections of time and space together. Both the Canon and Nikon cameras are trying to shortcut the selection process with relation to just one of these attributes - time. It actually makes little practical difference whether the selection of a ‘decisive’ moment is made at the instant of capture or afterwards. That might seem almost sacrilegious when I’ve long espoused the view that landscape images should be pre-visualised. I still feel that this applies to the selection of space – the framing of the image – but the editing process after shooting has always been a key part of the process with any kind of photography. There are always fine differences between images, even ones made from a tripod, that distinguish the best from the rest.

So, maybe things won’t be that different with the 'light bucket' approach from how many people – even great photographers – make images now. As the critic Alan Zenreich pointed out, “The decisive moment? That's when Cartier-Bresson pointed to a frame on his contact sheet and said, 'Print that one’”.

Still to come in Part 2…

I’ll look in more detail at framing and the photographer’s input – it’s not all about the gear! Ultimately what’s important is that the photographer has the ability to recognise something significant. And that’s the real skill. Great framing and timing arise from knowing one’s subject and connecting to it and I feel that this connection and pride in craft will always be something that serious photographers aspire to.

We all have a variety of self-censoring techniques that we use to refine our picture making choices. Some are to do with the light; is low, orange light really what I’m looking for? Really? In every picture?!? (In my experience the majority of people would unfortunately automatically answer yes to this.) Or the mental filter maybe about the composition; do I definitely want to put that tree on the third? Again, sadly, yes! But to my mind the more interesting filters are those that relate to both content and purpose. In other words where the end use in some ways dictates the way a photograph is made.

I can honestly say that a purpose for the image "in camera" never enters my head when I make a photograph. However, I have recently had a disturbing number of clients telling me that “looking good on the wall” was one of their most important criteria for image making. Unfortunately the corollary to this is that it’s not worth pressing the shutter unless the image will look good on the wall. And this view seems to be gaining ground. I’m not sure exactly where the idea came from (although I have heard other workshop leaders espouse this view, so perhaps it’s received wisdom?) or why it is granted such significance. But as a potentially dangerous meme I worry about what effect it might have on our photographic practice.

I have a number of different concerns, some may be trivial but others I feel could have a profound effect – I’ll leave you to decide which you feel more important. For instance, could some people infected with this meme be put off taking an image for quite prosaic reasons; what if the resulting photograph won’t match the décor in their home? (As in the picture on the right, in case anybody is having trouble imagining such an outlandish scenario!) There’s also the question of whether we might have certain decorative expectations of images that we place on the walls of our homes. Would images that aren’t ‘pretty’ make it onto the wall? And unless we decorate our homes like galleries, with plain white walls, mightn’t certain strong colours also be a problem? . Being “good on the wall” might also skew our approach toward making stand alone ‘masterpieces’ rather than working in series. I’ll return to the power of the series in another blog post but just to say that I feel the notion of searching for the single image that ‘says it all’ reduces the potential power of photography.

What could be better than putting the image up on your own wall? Why, selling prints for other people to display in their houses of course! Now on one level there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to disseminate one’s work (and being financially rewarded for doing so is even better). I’d go so far as to say that it’s pretty much essential to want to share if we want to progress our art. However, I find the emphasis on this particular context for sharing worrying because imagining an audience can, I think, stop us from making brave artistic decisions. There’s the temptation to second-guess our audience and this almost inevitably leads to making “safe” decisions.

I’ve heard a print purchase decision that relies solely upon the colour scheme of a room referred to as the OTC syndrome, as in “Will that look good Over The Couch?” My close friend Phil Malpas relates a story about when he owned a photographic gallery in Salts Mill in Bradford. On their very first day he sold three fine limited edition prints, not because they were Charlie Waite’s or Joe Cornish’s or even Phil Malpas’ but because they fitted the space or the overall tone of the image was right for the living room’s décor. Gallery 2C in Bristol even helpfully sorts its images by colour so that clients can quickly make the “right” choice. All these things make commercial sense but should commercial concerns be at the fore when we make an image?

You might think that this is just a question of ambition: does one want to make art or decoration? And is there a really anything wrong if one only aspires to the latter? No, not unless it limits one’s progress as a photographer. Ten years of leading photographic workshops and tours certainly have a bearing on how I feel about this. I’ve seen far too many participants set their sights too low and deny themselves the possibility to really shine.

Looking good on the wall should only be one, minor desired attribute for a photograph. There are numerous challenging images that have taken the art of photography forward that I definitely wouldn’t want on my wall but I’m delighted to own them in book form or can see them on the web. I can honestly say that when I make a photograph I never imagine its final use – wall, web or whatever. There is a complex array of reasons that, alone or in combination, might influence my decision. Here are just a few of the many possible motives;

• • because it fascinates me

• • because I find it beautiful

• • because I want to see how I can transform it through photography

• • to simply record what I see

• • to help me to understand what I’m seeing

Simply put, I photograph for the joy of photographing. It is true to say that I want to share my vision but at the point of taking I never try to imagine what an audience might feel about the pictures I make. (Though this doesn’t stop me worrying about the reception an image might get once it’s made – I know, I’m just full of contradictions!) I sincerely hope that there will be an audience of some kind for my images but am also content sometimes for that audience just to be me – especially if it didn’t fulfil its promise. I am acutely aware that every image is part of my journey in photography, each a potential stepping-stone to new insights and new ways of seeing. It’s sad but true that humans learn more from their mistakes than their triumphs. And hence, as long as we apply critical thought afterwards, making any image is intrinsically worthwhile as a learning experience.

The bottom line is that I don't feel we should never get hung up about hung over the couch...

It's been a while. Lots has happened in my life (and no doubt in both of your lives). But I'm finally ready to blog again. Perhaps one day I'll let you know the full story of the last couple of years; it's not been all bleak but the events have been all-consuming and not left me any thinking space to write regular (or even irregular) posts.

One of the time pressures I have had over the last couple of years has been my regular F-Stop column for Photography Monthly magazine. But with the wholesale change in editorial team there I've been relieved of my responsibilities - I believe the phrase is 'let go'. I greeted this news with mixed emotion as I really enjoyed the carte blanche that Grant Scott allowed me. And it was also nice to be paid to write :-o) Having to hit a publishing deadline each month was both scary and invigorating and I've set myself the target of posting here on an equally regular basis. Of course I'm reminded of what Douglas Adams had to say about deadlines, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." So you can be assured that whilst I may not post as regularly as I aspire to I will give it my best shot.

I hope that writing on a regular basis has also helped me to become better at crafting my prose, more fluid in expressing my ideas and less portentous. But of course you, my unsatisfied readers, will both have to be the judge of that. I'm planning to (shamelessly) recycle some of the ideas that I presented in the F-Stop column, to expand upon them and to invite your feedback. I've realised that the debate that a blog can engender was the thing that I missed most when writing for a magazine. One is never sure how one's piece is viewed when reproduced in traditional media. I'm not concerned about people disagreeing with my views, what drives me is the chance to engage in a conversation again. But there will also be plenty of fresh posts. I've been using the last few months to think about many aspects of photography and my practice and will be sharing my ideas with you in the near future.

The other thing that I've missed doing is showing my latest images - yes, I am still a photographer, contrary to what my absence may have suggested I haven't taken Trappist vows and locked myself in a cell for the last year and a half. And I have been making new images. I know that very few have made it onto the website but this is a failing that I intend to correct over the coming weeks.

So to kick the whole thing off here's a reworked F-Stop piece from April this year. I hope that it will ignite some debate and look forward to having another stimulating conversation with you all!

Photographer or Artist?

A chance encounter with a German in a Finnish car park has raised my blood pressure to unhealthy levels. No one was physically hurt during the meeting, though the ground was covered in ice and snow and a nasty fall was a serious possibility. Perhaps luckily neither of us was driving a vehicle or it might have led to a drive-by shooting incident with one of us armed with a clunky Cambo and the other shouldering a lissom Linhof… OK, time to let rip!

One morning after breakfast I wandered out of my hotel in Northern Lapland to find a group of four or five people clustered around an impressively large 5x4 monorail camera. They were obviously preparing for a shoot of some kind, with portable flash and reflectors dotted around the snow covered car park. My interest was piqued by two things: firstly the choice of location (the car park seemed a bizarre choice given the endless miles of beautiful tree studded landscape that surrounded the hotel); and secondly by finding another 5x4 user in such a remote place. So I wandered across the frozen tarmac and introduced myself as a fellow photographer and evolutionary denier (that’s someone who denies things, not something to do with ladies hosiery). It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find other people still using those single-use sensors commonly known as film so whenever I meet one I feel a compulsion to say “Hi” and congratulate them on their choice of media. Apparently, judging by the camera operator’s expression, by accusing her of being a photographer I’d either said something unfathomable or been incredibly rude – to be fair this isn’t an uncommon reaction to my utterances so I wasn’t too taken aback. I turned to another member of the group to see if my words had been lost in translation but the camera operator interrupted me, saying, “It’s OK, I speak English but I’m an Artist not a photographer.”

To say that her derogatory tone shocked me would be an understatement of monumental proportions. In a rare moment of wisdom I chose not to enter into a discussion but after a few more pleasantries wished them good luck and left with a cheery “Tschüs!” But inwardly I was seething. Why cannot one be both artist and photographer?! Or indeed, photographer and artist! The artist versus photographer battle is as old as the medium but I have always felt that the distinction’s only real purpose is to suggest a hierarchy. The preference for “artist as photographer” as opposed to “photographer as artist” is intended to suggest superiority. In the past, commercial art galleries would often rather represent artists and this meant one could reasonably expect to earn more for one’s work as an artist than as a photographer.

Over almost two centuries photography has often seemed like a poor cousin when compared to other visual arts. This view has been changing for at least the last thirty years in Britain – and for much longer in the USA and other countries – but if our goal is the widespread recognition of photography as an art form we’re still not there. I know that Andreas Gursky, Gregory Crewdson and others may be internationally feted as artists but the mythical man on the London omnibus still has an early 20th Century view of photography that matches his chosen mode of transport. (Incidentally I love Crewdson's beautifully crafted and evocative images.) The prejudices against photography as art are well known so I’ll confine my description of them to a simple précis. The chief failures of photography as art refer to mechanical aspects of the medium; firstly, and most importantly, its mechanical transcription of reality. It was the medium’s descriptive power that was long seen as both its raison d'être and its artistic Achilles heel. Secondly, the potential infinite reproducibility of the photograph counts against it in a society that habitually values a hand made object above a machine made one of higher quality. The real test of any object should be the quality of its design and, similarly, in photography the test should be the quality of the vision rather than the process.

I am proud to call myself a photographer, in the same way that I would expect Rubens or Turner to be proud to call themselves painters. To me the medium holds almost limitless possibilities for exploring the way I see. It also presents huge challenges if one is to make an image that speaks of more than it baldly describes – in the words of David Bailey “Painters have it easy, they can make things up!”

But I wonder if “the Artist” was betraying a lack of confidence in her chosen medium. Did she feel that to describe herself merely as a photographer would be to demean what she did? Or am I exhibiting a lack of faith and hypersensitivity by making a fuss over her remark? After all most painters in oils would describe themselves as artists first and then talk about which medium they use.

A few days later the owner of the hotel proudly showed me a Polaroid from the car park shoot. The image had a shallow depth of field and portrayed her standing somewhat forlornly in traditional Sami dress amidst Saabs, Volvos and Fords with her modern hotel in the background. Over the course of the next few days I glimpsed “the Artist” at work making a series of such formal portraits of the indigenous Sami people. Unfortunately I failed to get her name and haven’t seen the finished works so what follows may well be idle speculation – but what the hell let’s go for it!

What struck me as hugely ironic was that her art seemed to be relying upon the enormous descriptive power of large format photography (harnessed to some unknown, overarching concept – Sami, an anachronistic people?) to imbue her work with a gravitas born of its link to reality. Would a painting of the same subject have had the same sense of reality, of faithfulness? Would it have conveyed its message so forcefully? Undoubtedly the answer is no. Now, my long-term artistic ambition has been to subvert the photograph’s ability to describe, or at least to describe in such a way that the viewer is left on uncertain visual ground. Before any of you point out that the majority of my images don’t meet this criteria I will reiterate that this is an ambition. I’m freely willing to admit that it’s one that I only rarely manage to fulfil, but those images that approach my goal are the ones that I am proudest of. So, if “the Artist” is relying on photography’s ability to describe and I’m trying not to fully describe my subject does this make her more of a photographer than I am?

Now there’s a thought…

Chris Andrews

10th June 1964 - 17 December 2009

Death is nothing at all; it does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room.

Henry Scott Holland

Some of you will already know that Chris Andrews, a regular contributor to this blog, tragically took his own life on the 17th of December. Chris was my companion on fourteen journeys with Light & Land; from Iceland to Bryce Canyon, from the Hebrides to Montana & Wyoming, from the Canadian Rockies to California. But he was so much more than just a client. He was witty, warm, gentle, caring, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, intelligent and always stimulating company. Chris was somebody that I always looked forward to seeing. He was also my companion on a philosophical voyage through photography, somebody that taught me as much about photography as I taught him, and I was without exception eager to hear his opinions and ideas. He was always willing to help other photographers and freely shared his insights and technical expertise. His patience and wide ranging knowledge made him a great teacher.

So many of my favourite images from the last eight years or so were made with Chris only a few yards away. I feel honoured to have been his friend and to have shared numerous wonderful experiences with him.

Chris had been suffering from a depressive illness for a couple of years. I last saw him in May at an RPS conference in Cheltenham. He seemed in generally good spirits though I'd heard subsequently from his mother Annie that he was unwell again. I'm so saddened that he felt for whatever reason that he was no longer able to cope. Photography was his passion. He was a man who loved light and form, a man in awe of the beauty of the world. He was a very great photographer, something which I'm not sure he gave himself proper credit for, and I guess that I always hoped that photography would also be his salvation from depression. If not photography then I hoped that football or music, his other lifelong loves, would have lifted his spirits. His tastes in music were eclectic, ranging from Dolly Parton to The Smiths. The Cole Porter song "Don't Fence Me In"  was our theme tune on so many of our American journeys.

It's so hard for all of us who knew him to take in the fact that we won't share happy times with him again; won't share a drink or a joke, see him smile or see any more of his wonderful, evocative images such as the "Empty Chair" that accompanies this post. You can see more of his images on his website; Archive of Visions.

Words are such blunt instruments on occasions such as this, so inadequate at describing how we feel. But this quotation from Joyce Grenfell - read at Chris' funeral service by his father, Tony - seems to sums up the pain of parting.

If I should die before the rest of you

Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone

Nor, when I'm gone, speak in a Sunday voice,

But be the usual selves that I have known.

Weep if you must

Parting is hell.

But life goes on.

So sing as well.

I would be honoured if those of you who knew Chris would share your experiences of your time spent with him on "Oceans..." and I will pass them on to his parents, Annie and Tony, and brothers, Rob and Nick.